Dick entered Boulogne with two sailors whom he happened to overtake, and to whom he contrived to make known in French his desire of learning the nearest way to a public house. They led him to the upper town and to the cabaret for which they were bound. His pockets and stomach were alike empty, and his teeth were chattering from the cold. He was goaded by his condition to immediate effort.
As soon as he entered the kitchen, where the sailors promptly sat down to bread and butter and brandy, Dick proposed he should share free their loaf, their firkin, and their keg, on condition that any card they might name should be found on the top of the pack he now held face downward before him. If the top card should be any other, he should pay for their breakfast. Of course they jumped at the proposition, and of course the top card was the one they had named.
An hour later, filled with bread and butter, warmed inside by the brandy and outside by the kitchen fire, Dick went forth with some thought of soliciting employment from one of the several British merchants who, as he had learned at breakfast, dwelt in Boulogne.
In the streets, he felt as if he had been suddenly transported to a new world. The one night's trip across the Channel, between coasts in sight of each other, had wrought a greater transformation in his surroundings than the five weeks' voyage across the Atlantic had produced. The spareness, alertness, fussiness, and excessive politeness of the people was as great a contrast to the characteristics of the rubicund Britons he had been among a day ago, as he could have imagined. The jabbering of the people, though, was not entirely strange to his ears; he had heard its like from the habitans of Canada. Nor was the ubiquity of soldiers and priests new to eyes that had seen Quebec and its environs. Yet the tall, straight, carefully powdered French soldiers that he saw as he walked near the fortifications, little resembled the stout, well-fed English troops he had faced at Bunker Hill.
Now and then he could recognize in the crowd, at a glance, some round, red, contented-looking English face; and, when two of these passed together, it was a pleasure to Dick to hear the English words that fell from either mouth.
As he was approaching one of the best hotels of the place, Dick got a rear view of a gentleman standing before it, from whose broad back and solid-looking legs Dick would have sworn him to be an Englishman. Dick observed that this gentleman was looking at a pretty girl at an upper window of a house across the street. Himself gazing at the same object, he bumped heavily against the gentleman in passing.
"Damme," cried the gentleman, in a robust voice, "must you frog-eaters be always tumbling over people, because you have no footways in your cursed streets?" And he glared indignantly into the face of Dick, who had stopped and was inspecting him.
"I don't happen to be a Frenchman, and I agree with you in cursing the lack of footways," said Dick. "How have you fared since we met—and parted—at the Pelican at Newbury, Sir Hilary?"
"Eh? Sir Hilary? Pelican? Why, who the devil—By the lord, 'tis the gentleman that offered to pay the landlord, so we might all get away betimes! Welcome, sir! By your looks, I can guess you're like some others of us on this side the Channel,—you've had your own reasons to try the air of France! Well, by George, you shall keep me company awhile! You shall come in, and break a bottle with me, sir,—half a dozen bottles, damme! And after that you shall be my guest. Come in! I won't hear you say no! God save the King, and huzza for old England!"
And, having capped these patriotic exclamations with a defiant look around at the French passers-by, the exiled Berkshire fox-hunter caught hold of Dick, who had not the slightest intention of saying no, and hustled him cordially into the inn.